Over 6,700 Time Lord fans responded to a Doctor Who Magazine call to rate all 200 episodes of the classic sci-fi TV series, and selected 1984's The Caves of Androzani - in which fifth Doctor Peter Davison hung up his sonic screwdriver - as the best of the bunch.
Davison's finale beat 2007's excellent Blink, with David Tennant, …

@dunncha

Revisiting episodes

You might want to think about that. The old Dr Who's are pretty clunky and you are probably less easy to scare. Revisiting the older episodes is high on nostalgia and the storylines are at least as good, but you do have to get past a certain "disappointment" threshhold before you can see past the cardboard. The big rat was probably just a fat bloke in a woolly jumper.

At those moaning about writer / director credits

@dunncha

There's a big rat under Victorian London in Talons of Weng-Chiang (number four on the list), but the main plot is to do with a theatre and a Chinese God. Tom Baker spends the story dressed much like Sherlock Holmes, and it was originally broadcast in 1977 according to Wikipedia. Could that be it?

The Best Doctor

bet they only asked the youngsters

@Ken Hagan

Actually I disagree. I grew up as a child in the 70s and Tom Baker was my Doctor. As I grew older, I thought that I had outgrown the programme, especially in the McCoy era, but when they started releasing the Tom Baker episodes on video, I lapped them up because they were still great stories. I now have them on DVD and they are still fantastic!

IMHO, the Philip Hinchcliffe (producer) era produced some of the very best episodes of Doctor Who, and they stand the test of time to this very day. It is interesting to note that 4 of the 5 Baker episodes listed in this article were produced by Hinchcliffe.

Audiobooks - scarier

I used to have some of these Tom Baker era stories (including Talons) on audio tape (when we lived abroad with no TV) my imagination made them a hell of a lot scarier than when I got to see them on later reruns.

Personally I love the audio plays

I've recently started listening to the Big Finish audio episodes. While some of them are a bit by the numbers, many of them are absolutely terrific.

And of course, being audio, the pictures are *much* better :) There are no clunky special effects in my head. A lot of the story-lines are much grander than you could possibly get away with on TV since it's all in your head. Some of them are genuinely very scary as well, but you can't hide behind the sofa.

Logopolis

it had to be ... the whole program was drenched in a fantastic air of foreboding and mystery. Quite elegaic. The TARDIS inside a TARDIS paradox. The concept of pure maths keeping the CVEs open, the corruption of the register leading to the decay of the universe ...

I loved...

...Talons and Pyramids, so it's nice to see those in there. I would like to make it clear that this has absolutely NOTHING to do with Leela's or Sarah Jane Smith's respective presences in them. At all. In any way, shape or form. Just so's we're clear on that. *shuffles feet awkwardly*

More Moffat?

So the one in the library-world with the Vashta Narada shadows didn't make it to the top 10?! Now *that* was an amazing episode (pair of episodes actually). Not just carnivorous shadows, but also ghosts in mobiles, virtual worlds *and* a time-travel paradox thrown in. And the most impressive set ever used, because it was a real building.

For that matter, I'm surprised there weren't any Sylvester McCoy episodes in the top 10. His time as Doctor was when they finally managed to team up decent scripts with decent sets, and he made a very good Doctor.

Davies eps ? Seriously ?

Patrick Troughton

My favourite episode (well, it's 4 episodes or something) is the one where the Cybermen have a base at the North Pole. It's downright scary, even today. It certainly puts most of the "new" Dr Who episodes to shame.

spiders!

The one with the spider and blue crystals used to freak me out.

Strangely when growing up i didnt relaise how raunchy some of the assitants were at the time, maybe i have just become a dirty old man? (maybe Mary whitehouse was correct, maybe seeing such cleaveage at a young age twisted my psyche?)